


Harvest

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Series: Eight Nights [3]
Category: Kings (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Jewish Holidays, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, holiday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 03:25:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2797796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Did you ever celebrate Harvest, as a kid?” David asks, automatically, picking up the cards and tossing them back to Duncan.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Duncan just gives him the eye. “I was raised in Shiloh,” he says, “the only farm in Shiloh isn’t the kind you set up a hut and stare out into the night sky.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harvest

David loves Harvest.

He loves the ritual of it; how his father drags everyone out into the corn fields and how everyone gets involved, how everyone builds a hut and gets it ready and how his mother will occasionally smile and decorate it when she’s not so busy, and how all of them - all seven of them - fight for the spot where they can see out into the sky the best, and then how, a little later, all seven of them fight for the spot where they stay the driest, when it begins to rain. He loves it even as he, as the youngest, gets the default place right under the drippiest hole in the corn-leaf roof.

And he loves that every year, it is the same. Noah and Adam snoring, each louder by turns, Ethan and Eli kicking each other, and David curled up, listening to it all happen, and letting their breathing lull him to sleep.

No matter how much his brothers complain, he loves it, he loves it all the same.

~~~~~

The first year that David isn’t home for Harvest is also the first year that he is serving in the war against Gath, and those things are absolutely related. Everyone wants to go home for the holidays - mostly First Night - but David’s straw was the shortest of all. Eli got time off for Atonement, so he went to see their mother with a hangdog expression of someone armed with the knowledge that Jesse Shepherd would be in no mood to countenance her eldest son for seducing her youngest to war. But David was told, perhaps for Sacrifice in the spring, because he was needed at the front for now.

So David considers it, thinks of his brothers (save Eli, who is waist deep in mud not sixty feet from him) all lying in a hut in the middle of a cornfield. Listening to the sounds of war. His nieces, they’re old enough this year to go with their father, and he knows that they can sometimes hear the movement of the armies, slow and ponderous and loud, like some monster in the distance.

He thinks of his father, and what he would have to say about hearing that so close to where they live and eat and work, and he’s in the middle of frowning over the thought when someone throws a pack of cards at his head. “Shep, get out of your head.”

“Did you ever celebrate Harvest, as a kid?” David asks, automatically, picking up the cards and tossing them back to Duncan.

Duncan just gives him the eye. “I was raised in Shiloh,” he says, “the only farm in Shiloh isn’t the kind you set up a hut and stare out into the night sky.”

David doesn’t know what that means. “They show the king and his family setting one up every year,” he argues.

“If you really think the princess is lying under the stars in a grass hut, you’re wrong,” Duncan laughs back, and David supposes that there is truth in that. He’s seen the princess, always in the news reels, pale and slim and _beautiful_ in ways that David cannot actually fathom. Like something too precious to be touched or handled in any pedestrian way. She does not seem likely to do well exposed to anything much stronger than air.

Eli chooses that moment to haul himself inside from the mud, of course he does. He is covered, head to toe, and it makes him look more monster than man. “David doesn’t like the idea of breaking with tradition, that’s all.”

“Tradition isn’t so bad,” David says, and he can feel his face coloring so he busies himself with throwing a towel at his brother’s head, but overshoots, and it lands on Eli’s shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with-”

“Cold feet and wet hair and snoring.”

Duncan laughs. “So this, is what you’re saying. You should be glad, Shep, we’re celebrating Harvest out here every night.”

~~~~~

Nathan, it turns out, loves Harvest more than David. She can barely be coaxed back inside the tent after it’s over to ready herself for Assembly, covered in dirt and muck, the wildness in her eyes showing in the green rims of them. 

Finally David has to go out himself, even though it frustrates everyone, Jack especially, to no end when he has to cater to the whims of his mad prophet. “This fills God’s eye,” Nathan says, cryptically, and David knows she is gone into a fugue over it. No one warned him that dealing with prophets was such a strange prospect. In the utterly useless advice that Silas had lobbied at him in the season he spent at the king’s side, he thinks back and wishes that some of it had involved how to deal with someone who spent half her day immersed in the glory of God.

But then maybe Silas himself was preparation.

“We should go back. We’re going to move soon,” David says, and he will be glad of the end of the holidays, all of them.

Nathan turns to him, her blonde hair streaked with mud, looking entirely wild but too young. Too young to have left sanity behind so completely. “You will have to choose,” she tells him, and David listens, then. Whenever she tells him things like this, he has learned, it is foolish to ignore her. “You will have to choose, soon. The Harvest, the Heart, or the Crown. You can only have two. The third must fall the wayside.”

David stares at her. It makes no sense, she has never made sense, and he does not know better. “I don’t want the crown,” he says, sternly. “I have never wanted the crown.”

There is something in her face that is hard to read, then, something distant. “I think you will be sorry for that. God accepts it.” She takes a moment. “It will be a good year, David.”

_He could tell me Himself_ , David thinks, and regrets the thought right away. Some days he thinks it’s madness, the strange dreams, the odd feelings, the signs, he thinks he has simply lost himself in the din, thinking he sees patterns where there are none. Because there is nothing about him that invites Grace, is there?

But then he sees the way Jack looks at him and he blushes to think, that he has ensnared them both, brother and sister, so neatly, and perhaps it can only be God, pushing him towards this, towards them, as if they stand in for the whole of Shiloh.

(Because that’s what it must be, the love he bears these twins. It must be nothing more than that, even when in his heart, it is everything.)

“Of course it will,” is what he finally replies, and she smiles at him. “Although I can’t say how much longer the weather will hold, so we better get back.”

Her smile turns wicked, and then the rain begins in earnest, soaking them to the skin, and she’s laughing and running away like a little girl. David looks up to the heavens, and the entirety of the sky seems to laugh at him, just like his brothers did.

~~~~~

“I didn’t think anyone actually did this,” Michelle says, looking out at the tiny hut on the roof of David’s building. Tiny, but almost the size of his microscopic apartment, just the same.

“I do,” he replies, and pulls her in his arm, and kisses her.

~~~~~

“I didn’t think anyone actually did this,” Jack mutters as David hauls scrap and wood and leaves and David throws a rock at his head, for as sullen as Jack is, David feels he has had this conversation before, but it will not end the same way.

~~~~~

Crowned, the king does not understand, sitting in his own little hut, looking up at the stars, and wondering if when he said _the Crown_ , the night those years ago, God misheard with _the Heart_ , for that is the part of him that feels ripped away. Harvest is not a holiday to feel so empty, to feel so alone. But surrounded by everything he thought he wanted, he does.

~~~~~

The sunlight reflects off the water. Eli grasps his hand, and tugs. “Come on,” he says, “Dad’s waiting.”

David knows he is smiling as he runs, trying to keep up, little legs pumping. The hut is there. Tonight is Harvest.

Tonight is the best part of the year.


End file.
